I was at a conference with a number representatives from various publishers. During a discussion about access control I was basically told that publishers want to enforce specific spatio-temporal constraints on who can view (as in read with human eyeballs) their content based on whether a library or individual paid for it. They make the other content industries look positively benign.
That reminds me of the whole talk around "open standards" that you have to pay for to legally acquire (ANSI, ISO, IEEE, etc.), although in that case the situation is slightly different. Also, the "free software" vs "open source" distinction.
Ugh, yes. I recently wrote a parser for an ISO standard file format. I had to base it on the draft submission because they wanted me to pay them a bunch of money for the actual end standard.
I really hope the final standard didn't have any substantive changes, so that my implementation is correct. But all I can really do is cross my fingers since it at least seems to work with available data.
Charging for standards has a direct negative effect on the proliferation of those standards, especially today when a lot of code is written as open source hobby projects, which are left out in the cold.
You can find some standards at the usual places for books etc. (LibGen has some), but if you are not in a hurry then scouring the Internet very thoroughly will usually yield results. Google won't as easily show you as it used to, but careful queries and following leads through forums and such can bear fruit. You know you're getting close when Google starts showing "results removed due to DMCA" messages and requiring you to enter a CAPTCHA "because your search queries look unusual" --- the latter may even be intended purposely as a form of discouragement, but persevere and eventually you will find what you're looking for.
Then, once you've found a source, always remember to bookmark it and save a copy. They disappear from search indices quickly, despite the site still being around. It also helps to repeat your search periodically as sometimes the "shifting sands can uncover treasure momentarily" ;-)
It gets even worse. I am working on software that confirms to guidelines set by the Dutch government for handling healthcare data. These Dutch national standards were actually (and justly!) made free instead of available at a fee because they became requirements instead of just guidelines. But these standards are (naturally) based on international standards. This is fine for the RFC's that are freely available, but for the three (!) relevant Dutch standards (NEN 7510, 7512, 7513) you would need access to another forty-ish (!!) ISO standards that may, or may not, be relevant to the section you are dealing with.
Of course even a single PDF for these healthcare ISO standards costs up to €100, to be paid in Swiss Francs…
Luckily in the UK many libraries have access to BSO (British Standards Online), which allows you to view the standards in a DRM viewer as part of your free library membership.
It's not perfect, but it allowed me to implement an RFID data decoding library (ISO-28560) at my last job.
The publishers are either given the material for free and readers have to pay, or the researchers pay the publishers on the order of $2k per page to have their research published as open access. Not great in either case.
Surely, there's a middle way. Since we are talking about a club good [1], a club would be the appropriate alternative. Assuming a fee of 20$/month for people in developed countries and 100.000 members, this would cover about 1.000 papers per month.
Actually, the material wasn't given for free. In many cases you have to pay to get your articles published. There are fees for color figures, for example. All in all, you end up paying significant money to get published. And later people pay to access your articles.
You want everybody to have access, but you don't want them to get it for free.
Wow, so you want the entire world to all pay for the material you were given for free. Hmmmm.